Legal Sea Foods

Children get very few options when they eat out," Jasper White says. "I wanted to help them have a real restaurant experience."

That was the motivation behind the creation of the Legal Sea Foods Children's Menu, which earned the 1998 Nation's Restaurant News MenuMasters Award for Best Menu Revamp.

A consulting chef for Legal Sea Foods and a former restaurateur himself, White says the theory behind the menu is that "children don't have lesser palates than adults just because they're children. In fact, they have better palates, and their senses are very acute."

White's three young children, exposed early and often to seafood, are fish lovers. "I think most kids would be if they had it regularly," he added. "But they don't have any options."

"Most kids adore lobster," says White, father of a 9-, 7-, and 4-year old. "But if their parents have to spend 10 minutes getting the meat out for them, it ruins the dinner for Mom and Dad. That's happened to me, and it's no fun."

At Legal Sea Foods this parent trap is history. The lobster is removed from the shell and diced and then placed back in the shell. "We stuff it back into the shell so the child can have the whole lobster experience," White explains. "The parent doesn’t have to do anything."

That kind of kid-friendly thinking is typical of the new Children's Menu, a joint effort of White and Roger Berkowitz, president and chief executive of the Boston-based seafood chain. "I conceived it, but Roger has backed it all the way," White says.

Notes Berkowitz: "This is one of the best things we've ever done here. Restaurants have to offer healthier selections on the children's menus, especially with families having less time to eat at home."

White felt similar time pressures when he and his wife, Nancy, owned and operated Jasper's Restaurant in Boston. Opened in 1983, Jasper's was developed by White into a renowned seafood establishment and earned induction into the Nation's Restaurant News Fine Dining Hall of Fame.

Closing Jasper's in 1995 after a 12-year run was a lifestyle decision, the chef-owner says. "At that time my kids were very young, and I was at the restaurant all the time."

He and Berkowitz had known each other for years, and White joined Legal Sea Foods as a chef. The idea of revamping Legal's children's menu was born while White was full-time with the chain. He completed the project in 1997 after he'd become a consulting chef.

"I believe -- and Roger concurs -- that a healthy lifelong diet has to include seafood, but the time to introduce it isn't when young people graduate from college," White says.

Informal and fun without being condescending, the new menu is designed for kids 12 years and under. It includes a few standards like hamburgers and hot dogs but mostly offers scaled-down items from the adults' menu with some twists for the youngsters.

For example, the salad is tinged with sugar to encourage kids to eat greens. The macaroni and cheese aims for nutrition by incorporating nutritious and natural cheeses. The baked scrod is half of the adult portion but with less flavoring. As a chef, White is always focusing on what his kids eat. "It's my nature," he says. "I'm a chef. We obsess on food."

The menu started in White's head. He then began sketching out dishes. "We started working on recipes, and I'd give things to my kids to try and then invite other children over to the house for dinner," he says.

Once the menu was set, Legal Sea Foods produced a 60-minute video on recipe specs and preparation techniques for the chefs at the company's 15 stores. After two weeks of practice, the new menu was launched.